John Hirst - Australian History in Seven Questions

In the beginning all humankind were hunter-gatherers. About 10,000 BC agriculture was developed independently in a handful of places around the globe. It then spread widely; it came close to Australia, but in Aboriginal times was not established here. The Aborigines remained hunter-gatherers.

The highlands of New Guinea were one of the places where agriculture was developed, but it did not spread far, not even to the whole of the island. China was another place of agricultural invention, and from there it spread south to the Philippines and then west to Indonesia and eastward into the Pacific. So Timor, New Guinea, the Solomons, Vanuatu and Fiji had fields and gardens and settled village life. Australians now call this part of the globe an arc of instability. In prehistoric times these were places of settled life, while the Australian Aborigines remained wanderers.

Gardens came very close to Australia; they were cultivated on islands in the Torres Strait, between Australia and New Guinea. The people here were Melanesian, like the other gardeners in this region, though most spoke an Australian Aboriginal language. As this suggests, the Aborigines of Cape York had close relations with the gardeners of the Torres Strait so close that the fuzzier hair of the Melanesians is found quite a way down Cape York.

The Cape York Aborigines traded and fought with the Torres Strait Islanders. The islanders took heads from the Aborigines they had killed to trade for outrigger canoes from New Guinea. The Aborigines, in turn, traded with the islanders to obtain canoes so they had more sophisticated craft than the bark canoes that were used in other parts of Australia. The Aborigines followed some of the rituals of the islanders: they used drums in their ceremonies and placed the corpses of the dead on platforms. The islanders learnt of the throwing stick, or woomera, from the Aborigines.

In all this exchange the Aborigines learnt about gardens and garden crops, but they did not become gardeners. Sometimes it is said that Australias soil and climate and its plants were not suitable for agriculture, but this argument wont work for Cape York. The soil and climate were the same as on the islands. The women on Cape York dug up the same yams that were planted in gardens in Torres Strait. Coconut trees grow wild in Cape York but were not planted as they were on the islands.

From around 1700 AD the Aborigines in Arnhem Land and the Kimberleys were exposed to rice, one of the standard agricultural crops, first developed in China. The Macassans from the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia sailed each year to the Australian coast to collect trepang, or sea cucumber, which they sold for use in Chinaas a food and as an aphrodisiac. They brought rice to live on during their stay in Australia and to supply to the Aborigines, with whom they wanted to remain on good terms while they camped on their territory. The Aborigines liked rice, and the Aboriginal men who went back to Sulawesi with the Macassans for the off-season saw rice being grown, but the Aborigines did not move to cultivate their own rice. It could be done. The Chinese grew rice in the Northern Territory in European times.